On Water and the Wheel.

I was thinking today that we in the developed world don’t respect water enough. We respect its place in certain aspects of the environment such as heaving seas, placid lakes, bubbling streams, or the majesty of mighty rivers. And we respect it as a facility when the water utilities who have to collect, store, purify and deliver it tell us we mustn’t waste it. But then we simply turn a tap on and take it for granted. We rarely respect water for its own sake, despite knowing that without it we couldn’t exist as physical beings.

In the process of idly musing on the subject, the concept of ‘wasting’ caught my attention and I began to wonder whether it’s possible to actually do that in the broader sense. Surely, I thought, water is indestructible. However much we ‘waste’ it in terms of end use, it will always end up somewhere in the earth or in some water course before it goes through the water cycle all over again. And so I did a bit of research on the subject of water.

There’s been an awful lot of words written about it down the years. Some of it is mind-boggling yet practical, like the fact that the water we drink today is the same stuff as has been on the earth for an estimated 5 billion years. Other writings have been more, should we say, speculative, such as whether water is sentient, whether it has memory, and whether it reacts to emotion. Much of this I discovered by following the questions people have asked about it on Google, the most mind-numbing of which was:

Who invented water?

I’ve often found it intriguing to imagine that there must once have been an early Homo Sapien who discovered the rolling tendency of round things and realised that this could have very useful applications. But wondering who invented water never occurred to me.

A Footnote:

When I lived on the coast of Northumberland I was in the habit of walking into the sea every morning to pay my respects to the spirit of the water. I entertained the vague notion, you see, that it might protect me from drowning. I suspect the habit had its origins either in a race memory carried in the genes, or possibly an earlier incarnation as an Andaman Islander.